Recently I decided to seriously look into issue again, and I've had a breakthrough.

Luckily we all live in a real world, and we can easily apply the laws of a real world even on an internet application. With the help of a few good developers we've started collecting information, such as IP addresses, logs and screen captures of offenders who actually break US/UN laws by broadcasting inappropriate content in a specific situations. We've captured and saved thousands of IP addresses of alleged offenders, along with logs and screenshots which prove wrong behavior. We are initiating a conversation with enforcement agencies and we are willing to provide all the information we have. I hope that with help of a Criminal law we can finally get the problem out of our shoulders and get existing organizations which usually solve these kind of problems to help us.

What's now?

We've blocked thousands of IP addresses, reported offenders and service seems to be much cleaner than before. That is cool. Now give us some time to put new features in place.

There are already alternatives that don’t have censorship. I think a lot of people will ditch chatroullete because censorship, logs, screen captures, etc. make them uneasy, even if they prefer to keep their own clothes on.

I am not a lawyer, but I imagine that there are issues of international law and trying to figure out which country/state/county has jurisdiction to prosecute each case. Also, I am about 99% certain that under US law it is not illegal to distribute pornographic images UNLESS those images are distributed to minors, or the subjects of the images are underage. To make matters worse, the age of consent varies from country to country, and even from state to state within the U.S.

How do you prove that the penis captured in the photograph belongs to the person to whom the IP address was registered? Are you going to make everyone in the household, or dorm floor, drop their pants and compare their junk to the junk in the photo?

I can’t help but think Chatroulette owes some of its success to the freewheeling, consequence-free nature of anonymous interaction that also fostered so many dickpics. To suddenly fire a broadside into it now that they’re popular seems a bit of an ambush. Perhaps they’re responding to legal threats of their own.

Internet is free and, in one hand, Chatroulette has not a previous filter in order to define wether the person logged is a minor or not. So that we could think that CR is a free Video Chat Community with all that this means.
If a person is in a chat with another one and they agree to have a “virtual sex” encounter at that time, Has CR the empowerment to Censored or Banned that video-conversation? What about the private right of those persons?
If Chatroulette is free and without any previous filter…so, IS FREE, in all the meanings.
If not, Chatroulette should have a member cost.

screenshots of minors breaking the law? Are you kidding me? The whole point is to enforce the law. Another cop isn’t gonna pull over another cop over for speeding to a dispatch call… Only a chatroulette wanker would try to turn the tables with a comment like yours.

Great, now ChatRoulette will now have the world’s largest collection of penis photos. Sounds like such a collection could be highly illegal if they don’t have a way of verifying the age of ChatRoulette users, so that is an archive I wouldn’t want to touch with a–well, never mind.

Chatroulette without penises, I don’t think that has much of a future. Maybe just add a check box that says “I am over 18″ before being able to use it, so that nobody seeing or being seen is underage? Seems pretty negligent of them for not having that in the first place.

I got bored with Chatroulette like three days after it was posted here. The penises for some reason didn’t bother me. I didn’t know so many guys had such a deep desire to show off their penises though. It’s like you could get on a bus and say “I’d like to photograph 20 penises” and guys would be lining up to show off.

Went back at some time but it was way more boring than the first time.

Now that I think of it it was probably interesting that one night because it was full of people from boingboing and the like that had clicked links and probably never went back either.

I’m in my 30’s – a straight male who was waaay too prudish to ‘play doctor’ as a prepubescent, or ‘horse around’ with other guys as a pubescent or teen guy. Although there was the time in college but that doesn’t count because we were drunk and a hot girl asked us to. That’s not gay, right?

Anyway, The only erect kid-weenie I’ve seen was my own, and I barely remember it from then. Never even glanced on the net which is supposedly choc-full-o-kid wieners. Until I tried Chat-Roulette.

Man – WTF? Obviously one can ask ‘where are the parents?’, but we know where they are – out of the kids rooms. But what I want to know, are a lot of today’s kids, even the preteens, a bunch of exhibitionists?

When I was a kid, the most anyone would see of me were the guys in the P.E. class locker room, and not for long. The most I saw was other guys in the locker room, and not for longer than necessary (I’m American.) I would have died if anyone saw my erect weenie at that age. But what I’ve seen on CR, and read about what kids are doing with ‘sexting’ –

A while back, I was playing a video game with a ten yo cousin and he ‘tea-bagged’ my character. That’s another post, but again – WTF? FTW? TFW? and etcetera.

If you are broadcasting your dingleberries to dozens of people you hardly have an expectation of privacy. And if a kid is pointing a cam at his block and tackle, he is his own child pornographer. Chatroulette isn’t in any more trouble that YouTube for hosting an illegally copied video.